Architectural realizations, as well as the practices and know-how of architects, can only quite partially define what architecture is or might be. The virtualities that run through it are the best ways we can grasp it. The histories of the sciences and of architecture continuously overlap and intertwine over the course of the last century, because of numerous analogies between the virutalities they bear. Constants have appeared between their modes of emergence, like the search for a unified world via a (...) rationalization of processes and breakthroughs, or the irruption of monstruosity as a factor of regeneration and instability. Monstruosity, always renewed and never domesticated, then becomes the element that allows one to outline the fields of action we could take up and inhabit. (shrink)

These notes refer to the experience of Siberian cities, particularly that of Yakutsk ; they delve into the problematics in which those cities are caught as well as those that are refracted therein ; to the endogenous factors that refashion them as well as those which have been globally contaminated by their presence. There where the parameters of analysis have either atrophied or dilated beyond use, we can attempt to circumscribe anew the different ways of living an unstable world with (...) its coming transformations, regardless of their nature. The notes and the photographs in this dossier are taken rom an archive scheduled to be on line by the end of April, 2007, at www.subbotniki.eu. (shrink)